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I once heard a wise man say that governments are always wrong when making economic predictions. The questions to consider are by how much, and in what direction?
That the Government of Alberta was wrong in its economic predictions should therefore not be big news. But they were wrong by lots and widely in the wrong direction. Alberta was predicting averages around $99 a barrel for the past year. But it was not that prediction that got them in trouble, now facing a likely deficit near the $6 billion mark.
It appears to be the failure to account for the rising price differential –the difference between market prices and the bargain basement price Alberta needs to sell its oil to the United States because of our lack of pipeline capacity to deliver to markets. It’s what the premier called a “bitumen bubble.” The price differential is not new, and for more than a year, economists were predicting a larger gap unless greater capacity to carry oil to market were developed.
The core of the problem lies elsewhere, whatever the premier says: Two successive Alberta governments for close to a decade have now been unable to balance their budgets at times when oil revenue was riding high. When money abounds and one still runs out of it, it is a clear indication that the problem is not revenue. The problem is spending.
Jack Mintz from the School of Public Policy and other keen observers had predicted that we would be at this precise junction around this time. Keep spending more than you have while you bridge gap with a supply of money the flow of which you cannot control, and it is not difficult to see that when the gap-closing supply goes down so does your ability to keep spending in the same undisciplined way.
And down that hole we now go, raising the spectre of budget cuts and higher taxes. Not quite a cliff, as a friend of mine joked, but surely a Buffalo jump. Yet, the government is still not facing reality for all the reality facing it.
In her televised address last week, the premier keeps promising not to raise taxes, and not to reduce the budget lines of the two largest spending departments, healthcare and education, to deal with the $6 billion gap. Fair enough, but the promise to start putting savings into the Heritage Fund quickly gave her talk a hue of unreality.
Red tape reduction is not an exclusively Canadian phenomenon, and targets are repeatedly set around the world to reduce administration and regulation. However, the actions taken to meet these targets are not working.
The Hon. John Baird, then Minister of the Environment, in whose watch the mandatory policy for CFLs was adopted.
Among concerns about the health dangers of Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs (CFLs), which contain mercury, the Alberta Government continues to promote the product in its efforts to green itself and the world. The light bulbs are a good example of how elected officials and civil servants –eager to jump on the environmental bandwagon for the sake of political appearances– put people at risk and damage the natural environment in whose name they adopt such misguided policies.
At one website promoting Earth Hour environmental activism, the Alberta Government recommends here that people
Recycle and use compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs). If every household in Alberta changed just one light bulb to a CFL, it would be the same as taking the emissions from 66,000 cars off the road.
One Simple Act, the Alberta Government site promoting the virtues of Earth Hour, passionately recommends the use of the health-hazardous CFLs.
They go on to advise further:
Slowly replace all the bulbs in your home. Each time you visit your grocery or hardware store, look for sales and purchase a few more CFL bulbs. Check your electricity bill today, and after replacing 10 lights in your home over one month, check again for energy and cost savings.
For all night lighting, you can cut costs by replacing bulbs with lower wattage bulbs or by choosing a compact fluorescent or a nightlight.
In spite of this damning Health Canada report [in pdf] dating back to February 2012, the information the Alberta government offers makes no mention of the significant risks involved.
The Alberta inquiry into queue-jumping in the province’s health system appears to have run into a wall of memory loss.
Alberta’s Minister of Transportation announced the government is looking into building a high speed rail from Calgary to Edmonton. In order to be profitable, high speed rail must connect highly densely populated areas and transport huge numbers of people each day, and Alberta could not meet these criteria.
Instead of focusing on reducing the limits on political donations, Alberta should strive to raise their transparency.
NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg blames climate change for Hurricane Sandy as a means to deflect attention from the fact that he didn’t do nearly enough to prepare for and deal with the storm.
Calling on people to stop asking questions leads to ignorance. Dissuading people from asking questions about scientific issues leads directly to scientific ignorance.
The purpose of scientific knowledge never has been to reach certainty and to stop questioning. While science and technology mitigate some of the uncertainty in which we live, they do not get rid of it.
No science is possible without doubts. Questions are to science what oxygen is to fire: without doubt, science is extinguished.
This is a basic lesson that an Italian court could use, having recently convicted seven earthquake scientists for their failure to predict and warn the population about the 2009 earthquake that sadly injured thousands and killed more than 300 people in the Italian town of L’Aquila.
The sentences handed out by judge Marco Billi were higher than those demanded by the prosecution, which had asked for the accused to be given four years each. The judge also imposed lifetime bans from holding public office and ordered the defendants to pay compensation of €7.8m (£6.4m).
The verdict has been called chilling and shocking. It may be easy to blame the judge for his supposed ignorance, but such blatant scientific ignorance does not exist in isolation. It has a context.
The Alberta government’s legislative agenda for the new session of the Legislature was announced this week. What should we expect from it?
The government’s plan includes an education bill (reincarnate), a bill to amend electoral law and a bill to amend municipal electoral rules as well as one with guarantees for buyers of new homes.
But it may be the subthemes in and around some of the proposed bills that are likely to dominate the debate during. The Leader of the Official Opposition, Danielle Smith, has already served notice to the Redford government, for example, that her team will be looking closely into the questions of health, finance, and ethics. In that very context, they will be watching the pension issue as well as the commission of inquiry on healthcare wait times and queue-jumping.